One of the most frustrating problems facing grocery retailers is the lack of an automatic, accurate and efficient method to identify fruits and vegetables at the checkout (or self-checkout) lane. Many manual methods exist, but all are slow and inaccurate. The most common method involves consulting a printed list of all fruits and vegetables sold in a given store, to find their corresponding price codes. Since the process is so inefficient, many cashiers simply guess at the price codes or simply memorize and use a small subset of common price codes—especially if there are long lines at the register. This means the retailer loses revenue if the item actually sold is a more expensive item. For this reason, speed and accuracy are both important.
There have been attempts at solving this problem. U.S. Pat. No. 6,332,573 discloses one such device which analyzed spectral characteristics of light reflected from produce items.
It would be desirable to provide a produce data collector that alone or in combination with other types of produce data collectors addresses these concerns.